Navigating Quest

Once you've logged into Quest, you will begin in your Home directory: /home/<NetID>. The home directory has 80GB of storage and is backed up nightly. Backups are kept for two weeks.

You can navigate to the projects directory of your allocation by typing

cd /projects/<project_id>

Project directories are not backed up. You can check how much storage you have by typing

checkproject <project_id>

If you are not familiar with using command line, this tutorial,
Learning the Shell, will help you learn the basics.

Note that throughout this guide, items in angle brackets (<>) in example commands are parameters you need to change relative to your account and work. Do not include <> around the values you substitute into the commands.

Moving Files onto Quest

Software available on Quest

Many
applications are available on Quest. You can access them through modules, which modify your environment to enable you to run the software. Quest uses modules so that multiple versions of the same software can be available for different users.

If you would like additional software packages installed on Quest, please contact
quest-help@northwestern.edu. Additionally, you can also install software in your own home or project directories.

Running Jobs on Quest

When you first log in to Quest, you will be on one of the four login nodes: quser10, quser11, quser12, or quser13. From the login nodes, you can submit jobs to the compute nodes, edit files, and perform small test jobs. Login node use is limited to 4 cores and 4 GB of RAM per user.

To take advantage of Quest's computing power, jobs can be submitted to the compute nodes in two ways: Interactive jobs, which are particularly useful for GUI applications, or Batch jobs, which are the most common jobs on Quest. Interactive jobs are appropriate for GUI applications like Stata,
testing and prototyping of programs, running jobs with small core counts
(< 6), and for short duration jobs.
Batch jobs are appropriate for jobs with no GUI interface, large core counts, or long duration.

Getting help

Learn more about using Quest. If you need more personalized assistance, send an email stating your issue to quest-help@northwestern.edu
and the Northwestern IT Research Computing Services team will assist you with your issue.